Deja senti.

A recent episode of 'Brainiac', featuring an experiment to test the speed of smell, is the inspiration behind today's blog. If you've never seen this little TV gem, I'd urge you to watch it. Vic Reeves adds a healthy dose of 'Big Night Out' style humour, while co-presenter, Jon Tickle (ex Big Brother), explains the scientific theory. The show has been a source of inspiration for my children too, who run into the kitchen, when the end credits start to roll, and start mixing concoctions with cornflour or making 'volcanoes' out of vinegar and bicarb. The house ends up smelling like a back row chippy for days!

I conducted a little experiment of my own recently; on my son's Nike trainers. Rubbing bicarb into the shoes' inner linings, I was told by my friend (well versed in Kim and Aggies' trade secrets), would eradicate the aroma of ammonia. I'd blamed the putrid smell in my car on them, but the cause of that turned out to be 1lb of raw minced steak which had rolled under the passenger seat during the journey between butcher and fridge. It hid there quietly for 2 weeks, until it's odorant molecules began to murmur, then eventually shout out 'rotting animal!' Well, to be honest, I initially thought it was the trainers, but became convinced that a fish must have escaped its bucket the last time we drove home from a fishing trip. I blamed Pinky on both counts, and I was wrong. Rotten cow. Watchdog announced that Nike had conceded to selling trainers lined with a fabric prone to smelling of cat piss when damp. Not their words exactly, but you get the gist.

The smelly trainer situation remains unresolved as, to receive a replacement pair, I must show proof of purchase. Given that I have 4 months of bank statements, utility bills and tax returns strewn around benches and stuffed into drawers, just waiting to be filed, I fear we'll have to put up the smell of cat wee for a while longer. There is an upside to all of this. After the car mincident, I was forced to have it valeted. When it came back, I was greeted by the smell of Refreshers mixed with polish AND an envelope containing a card and £40 (from the mother-in-law) which had been rescued from a door pocket. Result.

I'm sure that if you'd choked on a Refresher as a child, the memory evoked by the smell of those fizzy sherbets would not be a sweet one. Just a whiff of Pernod takes me back to the night I decided to make my own cocktail of this sickly french pastis, orange cordial and cider (classy, I know). I'll spare you the consequences, suffice it to say that 20 years later, even a hint of aniseed can trick my gag reflex into action. Fried mushrooms, for reasons unknown, have a similar effect. My dad is afflicted with the same aversion to fungi, which he blames on a near 'death by mushroom soup' experience. I wonder if it's passed through the genes?


The jury's still out on whether or not my children have inherited my acute sense of smell, although they have used the sniff test to identify the owners of miscellaneous items of clothing, left at our house. Daniel's jumper had undertones of fried food and smoke, Andrew's t-shirt was a combination of Persil and Lenor Original and Joseph's reeked of eau de dog. My offspring also have the uncanny ability to sniff out my secret stash of chocolate.

I do wonder how my own home smells to other people. At the moment, visitors are greeted with wafts of Winter Spice which helps mask the slightly fishy smell emitted by the new leather sofa. I love the smell of leather - it reminds me of rummaging through bags, belts and purses in the back street shops of spanish towns - but smoked haddock is not so easy on the nose. When we come back from holiday and the house has had 2 weeks to reclaim its own smell, the woody scent is more discernible than ever. If I close my eyes, I can imagine the rooms as they were when we first fell in love with the house, 9 years ago. The smells of that era were baby wipes, nappy sacks, breast milk, danish oil, paint, wet plaster, new carpet and Perry Ellis 360 degrees.......happy smells that remind me of happy times.

For a brief time in the Moo household, the heartwarming aroma of freshly baked bread wafted around the kitchen. Back in the early noughties, I fancied myself as a bit of an Earth Mother, shopping for locally grown and reared ingredients to make healthy, balanced family meals, obsessively recycling, composting and taking pottery classes. The home-baking fad was short lived however, and the bread machine was relegated to the 'appliance mortuary', on a shelf shared with the electric juicer and deep fat fryer. These gadgets seem like a good idea at the time, but, quite honestly, the infrequency of their usage doesn't justify the amount of counter-top space they snaffle. Nowadays my bench tops are home to a mass of bills, statements, newsletters and a basil plant, whose fragrant leaves provide me with another happy smell.

Come to think of it, most of my happy smells involve food; Marshmallows, ginger, mandarin, cloves. Jo Malone, if you're reading this, I'd like to commission you to create a fragrance, containing all of the above, for me. A bottle of that for Christmas would make me one happy heifer!